1 00:00:03,300 --> 00:00:12,870 Good afternoon and welcome. I'm honoured and extremely pleased to present to you our speaker today, Dr. Khalid Fulani, 2 00:00:13,980 --> 00:00:18,840 Dr. Ferrante's associate professor of anthropology at Tel Aviv University. 3 00:00:19,290 --> 00:00:24,840 His research interests include, among many others, social theory, modernity, 4 00:00:25,200 --> 00:00:30,720 language and literature, secularism, Palestine and the history of anthropology. 5 00:00:31,440 --> 00:00:39,180 In addition to many articles in top most journals before, Professor Ferrante has also published a book, 6 00:00:39,540 --> 00:00:47,579 a book long ethnography titled Silencing the Sea Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry 2012, 7 00:00:47,580 --> 00:00:54,240 in which Stanford University Press and his next book, Inshallah Redeeming Anthropology, 8 00:00:54,540 --> 00:01:00,350 A Theological Critique of Modern Science, is forthcoming this year with Oxford University Press. 9 00:01:00,360 --> 00:01:07,440 Yes. And the title of his talk today is Putting Israel on the Couch, A Palestinian challenged from within the Leviathan. 10 00:01:07,980 --> 00:01:12,090 Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate your invitation to come. 11 00:01:12,120 --> 00:01:16,470 It's a privilege and it's an honour. And thank you all for coming today, this afternoon. 12 00:01:16,800 --> 00:01:20,130 I'm very pleased to be here with you. Do you hear me? Okay? 13 00:01:20,640 --> 00:01:24,060 Can you hear me? Okay, good. May I ask just the door to be closed? 14 00:01:24,060 --> 00:01:30,510 It helps me with that. Maybe. Okay. I think there are a few disclaimers. 15 00:01:30,960 --> 00:01:38,940 We have 40 minutes. Okay. A few disclaimers that I feel I owe you my audience for you to better understand where I'm coming from. 16 00:01:39,420 --> 00:01:49,410 I think I have seven of them. So I feel first I hope to explicate to you the terms of the title, the title of my talk and putting Israel on the couch. 17 00:01:49,800 --> 00:01:52,980 A Palestinian challenge from within the Leviathan. 18 00:01:54,330 --> 00:02:04,319 A In some sense, I feel my my task today and in this inquiry generally is to take you with me to the basement. 19 00:02:04,320 --> 00:02:08,250 Under the basement, as it were, to the basement concealed under the basement. 20 00:02:08,280 --> 00:02:18,150 I'm trying to go to put it differently. I'm trying to go two flights down into the unconscious of our modern political imagination. 21 00:02:18,510 --> 00:02:24,209 And that might make a the ways I you I use certain terms a bit tricky. 22 00:02:24,210 --> 00:02:32,130 So you may write to ask why Israel, why couch, why Leviathan and in what sense Palestinian. 23 00:02:32,610 --> 00:02:35,900 So let me just spend a few minutes to explain to you something about that. 24 00:02:36,390 --> 00:02:39,540 Why Israel? So I should make that clear from the outset. 25 00:02:39,840 --> 00:02:44,840 I happen to be a Palestinian citizen of Israel. I'm born and raised in Haifa. 26 00:02:44,850 --> 00:02:54,240 I teach at Tel Aviv University. I was the accused. But Israel, let me make that clear, is doesn't in itself, per se, interest me in this inquiry, 27 00:02:54,960 --> 00:03:01,770 because it it in this paper, it's in a vehicle, not the terminus of my writing. 28 00:03:01,770 --> 00:03:06,250 It's not the final destination of my writing. I go through it. 29 00:03:06,270 --> 00:03:13,830 Israel That is to arrive at my explicit and primary object of thinking here, which is sovereignty. 30 00:03:16,350 --> 00:03:25,710 But why the couch? The couch on the assumption, clearly this is a play on the psychoanalytic term that that indeed sovereignty. 31 00:03:26,310 --> 00:03:31,980 My my primary concept for today is the enforcement of political imagination. 32 00:03:32,400 --> 00:03:39,750 Hence the couch. It's the unconscious, as political theology tells us these days of political thinking. 33 00:03:42,300 --> 00:03:50,550 So be curious to visit at a what happens when we go down to the grammar of our modern political imagination? 34 00:03:50,790 --> 00:03:58,260 It's the soul. In other words, a sovereignty, I take it, to be not alone, to be the soul of our politics. 35 00:03:58,380 --> 00:04:01,010 Hence the catch Leviathan. 36 00:04:01,020 --> 00:04:11,130 Simply, if we're going to talk about sovereignty, how could we not revisit such a canonical, constitutive and founding text like Hobbes's Leviathan? 37 00:04:11,640 --> 00:04:25,830 Okay. And in what sense? Palestinian simply in the sense of being a sovereign, sovereign, less a subject, especially after after the nationality law. 38 00:04:25,830 --> 00:04:29,909 If you know what I'm talking about, we're the only self recognised. 39 00:04:29,910 --> 00:04:34,410 Legitimate self-determination is the prerogative of a Jewish citizen of Israel. 40 00:04:34,410 --> 00:04:37,350 So what happens to us sovereign less Palestinians? 41 00:04:37,680 --> 00:04:45,900 And so it's an interesting exercise to think about sovereignty from the condition of being sovereign, less how to look at it from the outside in. 42 00:04:46,590 --> 00:04:51,090 In broad terms, this is what I'm trying to do to think outside sovereignty about sovereignty. 43 00:04:53,310 --> 00:04:56,430 That's what's only one disclaimer. I'll go to the next. 44 00:04:56,910 --> 00:05:00,210 I'm also an anthropologist, so this is a new field for me, really. 45 00:05:00,420 --> 00:05:05,520 And I am very eager to hear your comments and critical comments, of course, and questions, 46 00:05:05,820 --> 00:05:12,150 especially as in some sense this is only preface to something that's going to engage me for the next few years. 47 00:05:12,930 --> 00:05:17,370 But I'm running as an anthropologist, however, not for anthropologists. 48 00:05:18,720 --> 00:05:21,780 This is an intervention in political. This is a political essay. 49 00:05:22,800 --> 00:05:27,780 So it's a new terrain, new field for me. Although one could argue what I'm conducting eventually, 50 00:05:27,780 --> 00:05:32,370 or essentially I should say what I'm conducting is a quintessentially anthropological exercise. 51 00:05:32,970 --> 00:05:42,390 How so? In the sense that we anthropologists think of our discipline as one that is charged with familiarising the and sometimes, 52 00:05:42,390 --> 00:05:46,440 by the way, that's how people talk about philosophy. So I'm trying to familiarise the art. 53 00:05:46,980 --> 00:05:50,280 And so you may ask, but what is the art here? 54 00:05:51,120 --> 00:05:56,790 And the art in my case would be the concept coming from the Muslim tradition. 55 00:05:56,970 --> 00:06:03,630 And that's the concept of Khalifah, that they're the bizarre, scary things that we don't want to touch. 56 00:06:05,610 --> 00:06:09,270 But in what sense do I come with a term Khalifa to this conversation today? 57 00:06:10,470 --> 00:06:15,600 Of course, I'm not thinking simply of the name of a political office in Muslim political history. 58 00:06:16,080 --> 00:06:26,760 It's not what interests me, what instrument is in some sense how the Koran itself invokes this term a Khalifa as as in a transient. 59 00:06:26,850 --> 00:06:35,190 Transient, I'm sorry. Transient inheritor and builder of the earth, as entrusted by the divine. 60 00:06:37,560 --> 00:06:42,600 If you'd like, I can refer you back to the second chapter in the Koran. 61 00:06:42,600 --> 00:06:50,190 Chapter two, where God describes the Koran, describes God as anointing on Earth. 62 00:06:50,320 --> 00:06:54,030 Khalifa If and by the way, anecdotally and if not graphically. 63 00:06:54,270 --> 00:07:01,080 KHALIFA In Palestinian society or Arab society in general could mean could that could be the last name of a Jewish family, 64 00:07:01,380 --> 00:07:05,550 of a Christian family or a muslim family. There's nothing essentially Islamic about this term. 65 00:07:05,790 --> 00:07:09,750 Each and every one of us could be relevant and explain that more later. 66 00:07:10,170 --> 00:07:14,430 I just need you to at the moment, remember, this is not the name of a political office. 67 00:07:17,210 --> 00:07:23,430 So rather than abandon this, I call it the Earth preserving concept to Earth corruptors. 68 00:07:23,750 --> 00:07:34,700 Given the age of doubt and Islamophobia, I wish to recover an excess of chronic access to this term. 69 00:07:34,700 --> 00:07:40,670 Khalifa For the purpose of what? The purpose of interrogating the paradigm of modern sovereignty. 70 00:07:42,620 --> 00:07:48,829 So it's not that this is a paper about reinstituting the Khalifa as a political institution, 71 00:07:48,830 --> 00:07:58,250 but rather exploring the usefulness of this notion of Khalifa as an ethical political disposition for building and preserving the Earth. 72 00:07:58,880 --> 00:08:07,640 I'm arguing in a century accessing the Koranic sense of the term before institutional sediments have accrued to this concept. 73 00:08:14,400 --> 00:08:18,360 And again, to reiterate, I'm doing this from a Palestinian standpoint. 74 00:08:18,360 --> 00:08:26,790 And what this means, just to be clear, is a sovereign less subject of a nationalist Jewish sovereignty, 75 00:08:27,660 --> 00:08:31,410 meaning Israel, from within the belly of the of the Leviathan, 76 00:08:32,700 --> 00:08:42,870 and with the sense of there is in me at least a curiosity to interrogate the costs and specifically the ethical costs of the safety, 77 00:08:44,100 --> 00:08:51,330 the ethical costs of the safety once it's entrusted to the sea monster that we otherwise know since Hobbs as the Leviathan. 78 00:08:53,710 --> 00:09:00,820 And in interrogating the costs, the ethical costs of delivering food and seeking cultural resources, 79 00:09:00,820 --> 00:09:04,990 as it were, outside the master's own house outside the Leviathan, 80 00:09:05,530 --> 00:09:15,579 whereby perhaps in my case, the Muslim tradition could offer perhaps some emancipatory resources for all inhabitants of Palestine. 81 00:09:15,580 --> 00:09:19,270 Israel would be they Jews, Muslims, Christians, or none of the above. 82 00:09:20,530 --> 00:09:24,190 And finally, this will be the end of my disclaimer today. 83 00:09:24,430 --> 00:09:26,530 When you hear me today, use the word sovereign. 84 00:09:26,770 --> 00:09:36,910 Please keep in mind that I use it to mean both the individual, but also the collective, the collective sovereign, but also the individual itself. 85 00:09:39,430 --> 00:09:46,750 Okay, maybe I should tell you about a something that has inspired this talk and the paper on which it's based. 86 00:09:46,990 --> 00:09:55,420 And that's, as I said, that Koranic reference to human beings as such human qua, human as Khalifa. 87 00:10:00,470 --> 00:10:05,900 That each one of us is, in a sense, Khalifa, by mere being humans on this earth. 88 00:10:06,800 --> 00:10:14,000 It's a timeless. To put it in a philosophical term, Hanifa is everyone's status here and this is a crucial point. 89 00:10:14,900 --> 00:10:23,959 This has been a crucial point for launching my my writing a because I'm trying to assist to measure to what extent the concept of 90 00:10:23,960 --> 00:10:34,070 Khalifa A partakes in an ethics participates articulates an ethics that is fundamentally at odds with our modern political imagination. 91 00:10:34,250 --> 00:10:39,860 Insofar that it's an imagination that is beholden to the paradigm of sovereignty. 92 00:10:44,380 --> 00:10:46,270 The final objective, if you would like. 93 00:10:46,270 --> 00:10:56,500 The goal of this intervention is to explore directions for invigorating what I call a decolonised Palestinian political imagination. 94 00:10:56,800 --> 00:11:01,150 I'm trying to basically look at the malaise of Palestinian political imagination. 95 00:11:01,900 --> 00:11:07,870 Why? Why state? What kind of state? And maybe there's something better than a state for us to fight for as the Palestinian people. 96 00:11:10,810 --> 00:11:17,170 And should should sovereignty continue to be the regnant concept governing our political imagination? 97 00:11:20,640 --> 00:11:29,730 The strategy for me to to to stir the water there with with our political imagination is to follow an immediate objective. 98 00:11:29,850 --> 00:11:36,870 So if let's say that the the first objective is to to question the limits of Palestinian imagination. 99 00:11:37,170 --> 00:11:45,560 My more immediate objective, my meaning, my strategy to get to that goal is to dethrone the concept of sovereignty. 100 00:11:45,570 --> 00:11:51,149 And please put it into this word I'm saying the throne, not dismiss the throne, 101 00:11:51,150 --> 00:11:55,469 the concept of sovereignty, by which I mean, if you ask me, what does that mean to the throne? 102 00:11:55,470 --> 00:11:58,890 I mean contesting the sovereignty of sovereignty concept. 103 00:11:59,400 --> 00:12:02,070 Why should it have such a hold in our political imagination? 104 00:12:02,280 --> 00:12:10,890 Why should it be so constitute of our political grammar and perhaps allow for another concept to be in the table? 105 00:12:11,040 --> 00:12:15,180 So you see, I'm not saying let's ditch, let's throw away sovereignty. 106 00:12:15,540 --> 00:12:20,770 Maybe there'll be good arguments at some point in the future wise we should keep thinking about sovereignty when we dig into our political, 107 00:12:21,030 --> 00:12:28,890 political imagination. But I'm saying it ought not to be the only concept or that the primal concept governing our political imagination, 108 00:12:29,310 --> 00:12:34,320 perhaps the telos that we otherwise not itself, could be such other rival concept. 109 00:12:37,490 --> 00:12:39,680 What is my tactic for reaching these goals? 110 00:12:41,450 --> 00:12:48,950 My tactic, as you may have guessed already, is to return to Hobbes's Leviathan, what he called the soul of politics. 111 00:12:49,160 --> 00:12:56,840 Hence, again, the couch. We're going to the soul of politics, and specifically to use a reference from Walter Benjamin. 112 00:12:57,230 --> 00:13:01,130 Let us drill into the paradigm of sovereignty. 113 00:13:01,310 --> 00:13:09,440 Let's do some conceptual drilling here. And when I say drilling, I have in mind a principle within the paradigm. 114 00:13:09,620 --> 00:13:15,500 So let's say the paradigm is this. Let's say, for example, just to illustrate visually, the paradigm is a square. 115 00:13:15,920 --> 00:13:20,060 That's the paradigm of sovereignty. Within that square, there is a circle. 116 00:13:20,360 --> 00:13:23,990 The circle is the principle of sovereignty. Excuse me? 117 00:13:24,260 --> 00:13:29,000 The authority, the principle of indivisibility within the paradigm. 118 00:13:29,660 --> 00:13:32,660 There is a principle and that principle is indivisibility. 119 00:13:34,130 --> 00:13:37,130 Actually, it's been called not just a principle within the paradigm. 120 00:13:37,130 --> 00:13:41,900 It's the defining characteristic of sovereignty. It's the foundation of political thought. 121 00:13:42,200 --> 00:13:46,340 I say that by relying on genealogies of sovereignty. 122 00:13:46,520 --> 00:13:48,890 This is Bartlett Berthelsen. John Berthelsen. 123 00:13:50,360 --> 00:13:59,180 Let me give you then I owe you at this point with without any further delay, a schematic presentation of my overall argument. 124 00:13:59,900 --> 00:14:05,750 Okay. So far, this has been just paving the road to what the argument is in its current structure. 125 00:14:05,930 --> 00:14:09,950 And I think I've identified four components. 126 00:14:11,240 --> 00:14:19,160 I'm allowing that constitutive to the principle of sovereignty is a categorical denial of the possibility of self oppression. 127 00:14:20,690 --> 00:14:26,720 In other words, this principle of indivisibility is constituted by denying that humans can bring themselves. 128 00:14:27,320 --> 00:14:33,320 Wronging oneself in Arabic is not as voluminous a reference that I'll talk about 129 00:14:33,320 --> 00:14:39,530 more later at this foundation of denial of wronging oneself as a possibility. 130 00:14:39,830 --> 00:14:45,860 A binds the sovereignty paradigm to an impoverishment and more specifically, 131 00:14:46,010 --> 00:14:50,870 an ethical impoverishment, and more precisely, an impoverishment of our ethics or fragility. 132 00:14:52,760 --> 00:14:57,710 And therefore, I argue, it should not be alone on the table. 133 00:14:57,890 --> 00:14:59,690 It must contend with rival concepts, 134 00:15:00,080 --> 00:15:07,190 a concept like paradigm that does not recognise that we can wrong ourselves as humans should not be the only conference, the concept on the table. 135 00:15:08,900 --> 00:15:13,270 This political imagination, therefore, ought to host rival conceptions of governance, 136 00:15:13,670 --> 00:15:19,160 the governance of oneself, but also of society, contending with the paradigm of sovereignty. 137 00:15:19,700 --> 00:15:23,390 But don't partake and don't participate in. 138 00:15:25,250 --> 00:15:32,600 In the danger to the ethics of fragility. And from within the Muslim tradition of formulating the human telos. 139 00:15:33,050 --> 00:15:37,250 I suggest the inheritor or the vice chairman or the successor. 140 00:15:37,460 --> 00:15:42,140 In one word, the Khalifa could offer such a rival contending concept. 141 00:15:44,270 --> 00:15:52,190 With the help of such notion, it becomes possible to chart new questions for Palestinian political imagination or any political imagination. 142 00:15:52,190 --> 00:15:53,840 Does it have to be Palestinian at some point? 143 00:15:54,170 --> 00:15:59,570 You may argue with me and say there's nothing essentially Palestinian about your thing, and I'm happy to discuss that with you. 144 00:15:59,900 --> 00:16:08,300 But the point is to a forge, a political imagination that's not beholden to the logic of sovereignty and specifically ethical impoverishment. 145 00:16:08,690 --> 00:16:22,610 And by keeping access how? By keeping access to an ethics of fragility, offering thus a rival aspirations for personal and collective flourishing. 146 00:16:23,720 --> 00:16:30,420 I've just finished describing to you schematically the four components of my argument. 147 00:16:30,440 --> 00:16:34,460 I'll get a chance to summarise it also at the end of this talk. But why sovereignty? 148 00:16:34,520 --> 00:16:37,520 Okay, let me elaborate if you want to. 149 00:16:37,640 --> 00:16:40,670 In other words, I'm sharing with the question if you want to contest, 150 00:16:40,670 --> 00:16:44,329 if you want to explore new directions in political imagination, why go to sovereignty? 151 00:16:44,330 --> 00:16:51,920 Consider sovereignty as political theology teaches us, is the thought of liberalism. 152 00:16:55,290 --> 00:17:05,040 And it actually we find resources in political theology for putting the state as an instance of sovereignty on the couch. 153 00:17:05,460 --> 00:17:09,570 Let's remember, the state wasn't always hasn't always been the embodiment of sovereignty. 154 00:17:09,750 --> 00:17:13,200 It may be a quintessential, historically quintessential embodiment of sovereignty, 155 00:17:13,380 --> 00:17:18,300 but this state remains an instance, sincere instantiation of our sovereignty, it looks like. 156 00:17:19,530 --> 00:17:24,120 The idea here is to go to the soul of the political, namely sovereignty. 157 00:17:26,070 --> 00:17:29,100 And again, Israel is but an instance of sovereignty. 158 00:17:29,700 --> 00:17:34,980 In fact, 300 years separate, 4 to 8, the founding of Israel and the Peace of Westphalia. 159 00:17:36,240 --> 00:17:40,260 Right. Exactly. 300 years. Exactly three centuries. 160 00:17:40,470 --> 00:17:45,450 Separate the we we the the Piece of Westphalia and the founding of Israel. 161 00:17:47,190 --> 00:17:54,270 But it remains an instance it meaning Israel. It remains an instance of modern sovereignty. 162 00:17:54,900 --> 00:18:01,740 But I want to go to the unconscious that enables something like Israel, that is sovereignty concept. 163 00:18:05,510 --> 00:18:10,770 In fact, you could say the unconscious of states being states, modern nation states, that Israel is only one of them. 164 00:18:11,220 --> 00:18:17,310 But I also if I joined political theology by paying attention to the concept of sovereignty, 165 00:18:18,030 --> 00:18:24,150 I also partway with it I part ways with political theology because political theology, 166 00:18:24,390 --> 00:18:32,610 for all the insightful things we learn from it, it strikes me as a sharing something with liberalism in that in that it retains, 167 00:18:33,150 --> 00:18:39,990 along with liberalism, a royal place for sovereignty. In other words, political theology does not question the sovereignty of sovereignty. 168 00:18:40,350 --> 00:18:44,340 Yet that's exactly what I'm pushing towards. 169 00:18:46,280 --> 00:18:53,970 And that's where my intervention in some sense becomes ethical in that I want to connect to an ethical horizon that difference. 170 00:18:54,270 --> 00:19:05,550 But doesn't dismiss sovereignty. I I'm trying to connect to an ethics of fragility which allows us to, as we reinvigorate our political imagination, 171 00:19:05,760 --> 00:19:12,450 to think also about finitude, about revelation as necessary for human flourishing. 172 00:19:14,880 --> 00:19:24,120 This ethics of fragility A is all the more relevant for a reinvigorating political imagination, 173 00:19:24,810 --> 00:19:30,300 given the transient, the transience I'm sorry, given the transience or the finitude of states as states. 174 00:19:31,380 --> 00:19:37,680 Hence my focus on the pivot, which is sovereignty and not transient instances, meaning the state. 175 00:19:40,200 --> 00:19:49,740 I'm basically trying to focus on the norm, the founding norm, meaning sovereignty, and not on its particular embodiment in specific forms. 176 00:19:49,980 --> 00:19:58,110 Hence the state. You may wonder why are you approaching the state as something transient, as a as a transient form? 177 00:19:59,340 --> 00:20:03,600 Allow me to bring you two testimonies. I have several, but for this talk, maybe two will suffice. 178 00:20:04,380 --> 00:20:07,980 One of them come from Hobbes himself. From within the Leviathan. 179 00:20:07,980 --> 00:20:11,540 We get to understand how states come and go there. 180 00:20:11,550 --> 00:20:12,720 They are not everlasting. 181 00:20:13,230 --> 00:20:23,280 Something we know all too well in the Middle East, but not only but also Arabic language, attest to the fact that states are transient. 182 00:20:23,640 --> 00:20:30,230 For those of you who may be sufficiently familiar with Arabic, the word for state in Arabic is Dola. 183 00:20:30,600 --> 00:20:37,800 Dola. Do you know what else Dola means in Arabic? It means, for example, rotation. 184 00:20:38,580 --> 00:20:43,350 Rotation. So even Halloumi talks about the dollar. It's that which means which rotates. 185 00:20:43,740 --> 00:20:49,800 In fact, in Bedouin folklore, the coffee part is called Dola because it goes around. 186 00:20:51,330 --> 00:20:55,590 It's not like the Latin star state coming from Stacey's right. 187 00:20:55,620 --> 00:21:00,640 So when we so Arabic language gives us one indication of how states don't last. 188 00:21:00,660 --> 00:21:04,680 They come and go, but so does the the founder of Fears of the State. 189 00:21:04,710 --> 00:21:15,960 Let's go to the Mortal Gun, the acronym moronic paradoxical term The More than God, the Divine that dies and hops himself. 190 00:21:15,990 --> 00:21:19,890 You can read it for yourself. Stipulates when do states die? 191 00:21:20,430 --> 00:21:25,770 I don't want to read it all for you now, but he's basically saying once the state, 192 00:21:26,160 --> 00:21:30,790 as a state begins to mess with people's past, they have basically signed their defence. 193 00:21:33,060 --> 00:21:36,660 Okay, take a minute to read it out because when it does. Okay. 194 00:21:36,840 --> 00:21:43,710 I put down for one of the most effectual seeds of the death of any state that the conquerors require. 195 00:21:43,830 --> 00:21:52,140 Not only is submission of men's actions to them for the future, but also and approbation of their of all their actions past. 196 00:21:52,530 --> 00:21:58,470 When there is this curse, a Commonwealth in the world whose beginnings can in conscience be justified. 197 00:21:58,590 --> 00:22:06,050 1651. Okay. That's for later. 198 00:22:07,310 --> 00:22:14,240 To return to sovereignty, therefore, is to return, as I said, to the grammar of our political, modern imagination. 199 00:22:15,110 --> 00:22:21,590 The grammar also because Rousseau himself continuing the tradition of hopes in the social contract, 200 00:22:21,860 --> 00:22:25,730 talks about the following that the principle of political life develops. 201 00:22:25,960 --> 00:22:31,640 It dwells in the sovereign authority. Thus, sovereignty becomes for us. 202 00:22:31,640 --> 00:22:40,790 For anyone curious to question the limits of political imagination becomes its eye to open to a few questions about freedom, 203 00:22:41,030 --> 00:22:45,349 death, community, and even revelation. Yes, revelation. 204 00:22:45,350 --> 00:22:48,560 I know it sounds counterintuitive, but I hopefully will get a chance to tell you why. 205 00:22:48,800 --> 00:22:53,850 Revelation. So you see. In other words, the concept of sign is in sight. 206 00:22:53,870 --> 00:23:02,540 If you can't resourceful sight from which to open basic questions of what makes up our politics of questions of freedom, 207 00:23:02,540 --> 00:23:04,910 question of death, questions of commuting, and so on and so forth. 208 00:23:05,750 --> 00:23:10,399 Having acknowledged the centrality of the sovereignty paradigm right, I hope I conveyed that to you. 209 00:23:10,400 --> 00:23:18,290 How central to our political imagination, the sovereignty concept and and within it also the indivisible indivisibility principle. 210 00:23:18,740 --> 00:23:24,049 Let's see what happens when Hobbes and Rousseau together formulate modern sovereignty, 211 00:23:24,050 --> 00:23:32,600 the sort of politics as they form formulated according to a divine paradigm of modern ruling. 212 00:23:32,900 --> 00:23:37,850 Meaning, if you're not sovereign, you're not legitimate, right? They're allies. 213 00:23:37,850 --> 00:23:44,690 And in a sociable and defining principle within the paradigm known as the indivisibility principle. 214 00:23:45,620 --> 00:23:52,129 But what happens is that this indivisibility principle within the paradigm of sovereignty demands oneness again, 215 00:23:52,130 --> 00:23:59,030 following the logic of transferring divine theological concepts into secular political concepts. 216 00:23:59,300 --> 00:24:10,070 Just like God is one. So this, the earthly sovereign is one meaning he or she is sovereign must also be one, must also be indivisible. 217 00:24:11,270 --> 00:24:17,200 So I'm remember I said, I'm drilling. I want us to go further and further into into the atom of the paradigm. 218 00:24:18,740 --> 00:24:24,980 But what that means to be one and to be indivisible is that the sovereign is self-sufficient and autonomous. 219 00:24:25,640 --> 00:24:33,230 The be that the king, the law, the ruler or the people or the individual. 220 00:24:34,580 --> 00:24:40,370 And thus all the way from Jean Beaudin, who wrote before Hobbs all the way to Isaiah Berlin. 221 00:24:40,790 --> 00:24:47,540 Indivisibility principle has been a discernible from and to divine eyes, 222 00:24:47,570 --> 00:24:57,440 along with the sovereign deferred on meaning and insistent a continuous insistence on the oneness of the sovereign. 223 00:24:58,400 --> 00:25:06,560 It's the sovereign, self-sufficiency and autonomy for man be unto himself becomes demonised, the conscience becomes demonised. 224 00:25:06,950 --> 00:25:15,710 And this has been the the the regnant ways of thinking about both the governing of states and the governing of human souls. 225 00:25:17,840 --> 00:25:21,559 But political theology is less concerned with the indivisibility principle, 226 00:25:21,560 --> 00:25:27,290 as you may know, and more concerned with, especially after agamben, with exception. 227 00:25:28,820 --> 00:25:36,110 But let's pay attention to how how theologically rooted and prominent this notion of indivisibility. 228 00:25:36,110 --> 00:25:42,290 We can find it, I want to argue, but with like your hope with that maybe in the discussion that at the foundation 229 00:25:42,290 --> 00:25:47,360 of this principle of indivisibility is perhaps some some Lutheran thinking. 230 00:25:47,690 --> 00:25:50,060 Look, there were three in the sense of Martin Luther. 231 00:25:51,650 --> 00:25:57,920 So let's go back to Luther and see how he left his own imprint on modern states, including the Jewish modern state. 232 00:25:58,730 --> 00:26:06,770 Let's see Luther at work. My source for that and maybe you have someone better to suggest is Jean Elstein Beth Goldstein, 233 00:26:07,400 --> 00:26:15,740 where she cites him as someone who has divine conscience and his rebellion against papal authority, 234 00:26:16,220 --> 00:26:22,340 where he describes his in his state of being and with his conscience as utterly free in conscience and innermost being, 235 00:26:22,670 --> 00:26:28,010 innermost being meaning where freedom is, where conscience is. 236 00:26:28,250 --> 00:26:30,350 He experiences freedom in conscience. 237 00:26:34,440 --> 00:26:42,479 Maybe this is not clear entirely what's happening by conscience, but I hope in just a few minutes to be able to connect you. 238 00:26:42,480 --> 00:26:44,910 Why I'm why am I getting to Luther and to conscience? 239 00:26:47,190 --> 00:26:56,249 But for me to do that, I have to close my terms of engagement now with political theology for all the dark spots I'm trying to see, 240 00:26:56,250 --> 00:27:06,960 for all the dark spots that political theology has helped us understand about the working of a liberal governance and liberal democracies, 241 00:27:07,410 --> 00:27:14,610 how they conceal violence, how they conceal the exception and the sacred under their secular guise. 242 00:27:15,360 --> 00:27:18,810 There seems a tenacious I want to argue critically with political theology. 243 00:27:18,990 --> 00:27:26,340 There seems to be a tenacious blindspot. And that spot is, as I said, the sovereignty of sovereignty concept. 244 00:27:27,270 --> 00:27:36,090 And. The attention I want to draw to is here the attention to the danger it poses to the ethics, 245 00:27:36,510 --> 00:27:42,210 not the flexibility or applicability of the paradigm of sovereignty. 246 00:27:43,230 --> 00:27:46,559 In other words, what interests me to take this a bit empirically. What? 247 00:27:46,560 --> 00:27:50,490 Not to debate whether should there be one state to state? 248 00:27:50,700 --> 00:27:54,360 Three states. They have state. But rather, what is the state anyway? 249 00:27:54,630 --> 00:27:58,530 Is it worth having? What kind of danger? Ethical danger it poses. 250 00:28:01,490 --> 00:28:09,170 So if political theology shares with liberalism, its enabling hold of sovereignty over our political imagination. 251 00:28:09,320 --> 00:28:16,459 My attempt in this project is to ask, after a century long disillusion dissolving, 252 00:28:16,460 --> 00:28:23,360 I should see actually dissolving of the Arab and Muslim governance since 1916. 253 00:28:23,480 --> 00:28:30,200 You know why 1916, right? The Sykes-Picot after a century of dissolving what we now call Middle East. 254 00:28:31,130 --> 00:28:38,480 My interest is not how to share the apple, how Jews and Arabs can, you know, have a state or how each part could have a state. 255 00:28:38,480 --> 00:28:44,430 But again. And that. You know, should we have an apple of our own? 256 00:28:45,030 --> 00:28:48,480 But rather. But is it an apple that we should taste from? 257 00:28:51,380 --> 00:28:56,660 Hence my need for a molecular inquiry. Molecular, conceptually speaking, molecular meaning. 258 00:28:56,660 --> 00:28:58,490 I go into the paradigm of sovereignty. 259 00:28:58,790 --> 00:29:07,730 I zoom in on the principle of indivisibility in the paradigm and then look closely at conscience and specifically the demand for oneness. 260 00:29:09,650 --> 00:29:18,200 Drilling into the principle of indivisibility and the kind of ethics it either fosters or frustrates in the world today, 261 00:29:18,980 --> 00:29:23,810 the principle of indivisibility stands as one of the logical properties of sovereignty. 262 00:29:24,080 --> 00:29:27,840 Meaning it's a it's something that individual. Excuse me. 263 00:29:27,860 --> 00:29:34,510 It's something that sovereignty demands that it that it contains this property of indivisibility, in fact. 264 00:29:34,520 --> 00:29:39,410 But this in terms of this principle, is the condition of possibility for sovereignty. 265 00:29:41,880 --> 00:29:47,070 Just as God was, is one and thus indivisible. 266 00:29:47,250 --> 00:29:56,850 So to our modern sovereign and so articulate this oneness and then which has been endorsed with us all the way to the 21st century, 267 00:29:57,000 --> 00:30:00,510 as indispensable for sovereignty. But who is the sovereign? 268 00:30:01,140 --> 00:30:07,050 According to Hobbs, the sovereign is the one who carries the person that is the Commonwealth. 269 00:30:07,410 --> 00:30:08,880 And here we get to hear him. 270 00:30:09,030 --> 00:30:16,680 How he talks about the indivisibility and is by definition is indivisible, for it is the unity of the representative, he tells us. 271 00:30:17,040 --> 00:30:21,690 Not the unity of that represented. That makes makes the person one. 272 00:30:25,550 --> 00:30:32,600 And I'm getting closer to my crucial point of intervention now that we understand that the sovereign is one, the sovereign is indivisible. 273 00:30:37,000 --> 00:30:48,570 What's this indivisibility about? In formulating their the indivisibility principle in the way they did Hubbs and Rousseau together make and 274 00:30:48,580 --> 00:30:55,450 this is a crucial point of the intervention make justice and injustice as valid only within the contract. 275 00:30:55,930 --> 00:30:59,200 Right outside the Leviathan, there is unnecessary death. 276 00:30:59,560 --> 00:31:06,790 Violence. There were all against all. There and only there. 277 00:31:10,210 --> 00:31:21,370 We cannot talk about injustice and justice because those two categories are only relevant to society, not in nature and not in solitude. 278 00:31:21,700 --> 00:31:29,500 You may ask one Why does Hubbs deny the fact that injustice and justice are relevant outside society, outside the country? 279 00:31:31,510 --> 00:31:37,380 And this is the crucial point because he, he and Rousseau together argue that is actually impossible. 280 00:31:37,840 --> 00:31:44,230 Two wrongs yourself. You cannot strong yourself. Injustice towards oneself is impossible. 281 00:31:44,910 --> 00:31:48,549 One oneness of the sovereign, the sovereignty that the king, 282 00:31:48,550 --> 00:31:55,810 the people or single person precludes injustice towards oneself because the sovereign is one and one cannot harm oneself. 283 00:31:56,260 --> 00:31:59,290 Let this actually read them both articulating this denial. 284 00:32:05,360 --> 00:32:10,129 And the definition of injustice is no other than the not performance of governance. 285 00:32:10,130 --> 00:32:14,390 Right. So you see injustice, class injustice are relevant only to contracts. 286 00:32:15,590 --> 00:32:24,410 If the meaning justice and injustice were faculties, they might be in a man that we're alone in the world, as well as his senses and passions. 287 00:32:24,620 --> 00:32:30,890 The meaning justice and justice are qualities that they relate to men in society, not in solitude. 288 00:32:31,880 --> 00:32:35,720 Further, with jobs, we hear whatsoever is sovereign death. 289 00:32:35,930 --> 00:32:40,730 It can be no injury to any of his subjects, nor he, 290 00:32:40,880 --> 00:32:47,480 nor ought to be by any of them accused of injustice, because to do injury to oneself is impossible. 291 00:32:47,840 --> 00:32:52,670 Just these words that I underlined is what launched in some sense my inquiry in writing this piece. 292 00:32:52,910 --> 00:33:02,070 To do injury to oneself is impossible. Because I'm curious. 293 00:33:05,940 --> 00:33:16,980 Excuse me? Because it's here that I begin to raise the question what ethical capabilities are emaciated with this denial, 294 00:33:17,820 --> 00:33:23,340 with the sovereignty regime that demands the denial of self oppression? 295 00:33:24,120 --> 00:33:34,139 Now, let's contrast this. Oh, no, I have to show you this also before I contrast with the notion of wronging oneself in, 296 00:33:34,140 --> 00:33:41,460 the Hobson's men shall judge what is lawful and unlawful, not by the law itself, but by their own conscience. 297 00:33:41,670 --> 00:33:45,209 That is to say, by their own private judgement. Now we understand. 298 00:33:45,210 --> 00:33:47,220 Maybe better. What about Luther on conscience? 299 00:33:47,220 --> 00:33:55,799 Because in some sense, if we want to do a genealogy of this denial, one has to go back to Luther and Russell continues. 300 00:33:55,800 --> 00:34:00,340 Hobbs, as Hobbs continued Luther by saying Conscience never deceives us. 301 00:34:00,360 --> 00:34:04,260 You see how they absolve conscience from everything. Conscience can never go to court. 302 00:34:04,890 --> 00:34:08,280 Conscience never deceives us because laws are acts of. 303 00:34:08,280 --> 00:34:16,320 The general will no longer ask if the law can be unjust because no one is unjust to himself. 304 00:34:16,650 --> 00:34:19,850 You see how strikingly similar Hobbes and Rousseau. 305 00:34:20,040 --> 00:34:25,559 No one is unjust to himself. And because no one is unjust to himself. 306 00:34:25,560 --> 00:34:34,879 Almost to the word. But then the question arises for us what kind of ethical accounts we can generate of our 307 00:34:34,880 --> 00:34:41,900 failures or fortitude as ethical subjects if we fail to recognise the possibility of self-harm, 308 00:34:42,650 --> 00:34:50,870 of wronging oneself as a possibility, if we absolve conscience from any tribunal, if sovereignty to move forward, 309 00:34:51,020 --> 00:34:54,770 if sovereignty is no longer the Archimedes point of our politics, 310 00:34:54,920 --> 00:35:02,870 meaning if we look at sovereignty completely from the outside, if costs to our sovereignty bound ethics are interrogated, 311 00:35:04,310 --> 00:35:14,510 we could find two forms of enslavement that we maybe should recognise and interrogate a relationship to our death and to our relationship to reason. 312 00:35:16,160 --> 00:35:22,460 This is a place where we could see two flights of consciousness down under the instances or symptoms. 313 00:35:22,970 --> 00:35:25,700 That is the modern state, in this case Israel. 314 00:35:26,300 --> 00:35:34,640 What the crushing of ethics, of fragility due to sovereignty, principle of India's indivisibility, what what such aggression could entail. 315 00:35:36,260 --> 00:35:42,520 Let me focus just a little bit on. The first casualty, our relationship to death. 316 00:35:45,220 --> 00:35:52,810 Our mortality. Our sometimes philosopher calls the ethics of finitude usurped by the mortal God. 317 00:35:52,870 --> 00:35:58,000 Mortal God. The state's right, as it scolded. The state is so deeply anxious. 318 00:35:58,270 --> 00:36:01,740 Controls are spoken from political theology. 319 00:36:01,750 --> 00:36:06,730 It's so deeply anxious of its own death that it makes the subjects of the state or the citizens 320 00:36:07,030 --> 00:36:12,880 enslaved insofar that they don't recognise and don't authentically attend to their own essence, 321 00:36:13,840 --> 00:36:21,340 which is their own mortality. To bring an empirical example to what, in discussing conceptually, think of Israel's obsession with Iran. 322 00:36:21,880 --> 00:36:31,720 Iran. Iran. Iran. In the meantime, car accidents, drugs and labour fatalities as as primary cause of death in the country. 323 00:36:34,900 --> 00:36:39,760 So if the sovereigns cannot wrong themselves, how can individuals see that they're wrong themselves? 324 00:36:41,800 --> 00:36:46,390 How could they wrong themselves? Let's think of what I argue always with my 13 year old son. 325 00:36:46,540 --> 00:36:49,630 How many hours do you need to spend on Fortnite? The game every day. 326 00:36:50,080 --> 00:36:53,920 I'm trying to convince him that he's wrong himself. I'm a successful. 327 00:36:53,920 --> 00:36:56,960 I can't be sure, but this is who I am. 328 00:36:56,990 --> 00:37:02,980 One what I'm trying to mobilise wrong in oneself argument against my son's obsession with Fortnite game. 329 00:37:03,340 --> 00:37:11,830 But. But this is just, you know, personal example. But how tenable is this vision of reality really, 330 00:37:12,590 --> 00:37:23,320 in the reality in which individuals are are seen as incapable of wronging themselves when we basically absolve a our conscience from examination? 331 00:37:24,730 --> 00:37:30,550 And why why should we examine conscience in the first place because of this absolving? 332 00:37:33,400 --> 00:37:36,970 Let me go to the second casualty, and that's the place of revelation. 333 00:37:39,870 --> 00:37:50,840 Our relationship to revelation. If you look directly at the insecurity of the states, if we look at it, 334 00:37:51,930 --> 00:37:56,700 if we look if you look directly at the insecurity of the states governing paradigm, 335 00:37:57,570 --> 00:38:01,530 meaning specifically the insecurity or instability of the sovereignty concept, 336 00:38:01,950 --> 00:38:10,230 how itself as a concept sovereignty is open to definition of change, meaning it's malleable, it's theme, and it's not essential about politics. 337 00:38:10,380 --> 00:38:17,760 One thing we learned from Parkinson in his genealogy of sovereignty, it's not essentially or inherently a political concept. 338 00:38:18,060 --> 00:38:23,700 Actually, it's an ethical as well as an epistemic concept, meaning it has to do with how we organise our knowledge. 339 00:38:26,610 --> 00:38:32,130 That could mean that the loss of a sense of frailty, the loss of our access to ethics or fragility, 340 00:38:32,490 --> 00:38:36,600 will make us lose a sense of the fragility of reason. 341 00:38:39,280 --> 00:38:45,849 How so? In that threesome retains its sovereignty over revelation and keeps the true meaning, 342 00:38:45,850 --> 00:38:51,730 reason and revelation as separate and not only separate reason and revelation remain estranged from each other. 343 00:38:51,910 --> 00:38:59,830 This is, I'm trying to say, the epistemic and cost or casualty of crossing our ethics of fragility, because we take reason to be everything. 344 00:39:02,870 --> 00:39:03,950 So in other words, 345 00:39:04,070 --> 00:39:12,020 the task of questioning modern political imagination may turn out to be the task of interrogating not only the claims of the state to reason, 346 00:39:12,020 --> 00:39:18,350 which is, you know, what political theologians do, oh, how the state pretends that it's a normal, sane state, but it's really crazy state. 347 00:39:18,500 --> 00:39:24,020 Well, you've seen that exercise in many places and think the task is even further than that. 348 00:39:24,320 --> 00:39:30,740 The task is not only to clean the question claims of state to reason, but also reasons clean to sovereignty. 349 00:39:32,420 --> 00:39:34,760 We turned the table around and question what the reason is. 350 00:39:36,380 --> 00:39:43,670 We questioned the tyranny of reason, and perhaps that too could emerge as a second form of enslavement. 351 00:39:44,090 --> 00:39:49,400 And the irony is here to bring an empirical example from the two flights down into consciousness. 352 00:39:49,700 --> 00:39:56,090 The irony is that we have a nationalist, secular Jewish state participating in the western secular dimension, 353 00:39:56,890 --> 00:40:00,350 a of an alienation of religion in the world. 354 00:40:01,940 --> 00:40:07,640 Let me summarise the argument, even though I feel I skipped this slide. Yes, I skipped this line. 355 00:40:08,120 --> 00:40:10,820 You heard me talk a lot about wronging oneself. 356 00:40:13,070 --> 00:40:22,260 I've been informed and think that by a couple of verses in the Koran and the concept would be voluminous or doing injustice to oneself. 357 00:40:25,040 --> 00:40:32,240 This happens in multiple places in the Koran. I just chose to hear, for example, in chapter two, Saurashtra McCarroll, Moses. 358 00:40:32,990 --> 00:40:39,590 I think this is full citation. And Moses said to his people, All my people, indeed, you are wronging yourselves by worshipping the calf. 359 00:40:40,080 --> 00:40:45,380 Okay. This is just a fragment of a story of an encounter between Moses and his rights in China. 360 00:40:45,920 --> 00:40:54,010 And then there's another story, the parable of the parable of the cave sura, 18, sort of telegraph. 361 00:40:54,160 --> 00:41:00,740 Okay. And this is a reference to a man who was endowed with a lot of wealth. 362 00:41:01,490 --> 00:41:06,530 And he mistook himself and his property to be eternal, lasting forever without an end. 363 00:41:07,520 --> 00:41:13,490 And that is considered in the Koran, thinking yourself immortal to be a form of wronging yourself. 364 00:41:14,300 --> 00:41:18,590 The luminous. And he entered his garden being unjust to his soul. 365 00:41:18,810 --> 00:41:23,870 The only Malinowski saying, I don't think this will ever perish this meaning his wealth. 366 00:41:28,280 --> 00:41:31,480 So towards ending. 367 00:41:31,490 --> 00:41:42,290 Let me say the following. We have a code here. Could Western political imagination accept and admit migrant notions outside the regimes of sovereignty 368 00:41:42,650 --> 00:41:47,660 in which sovereignty concept is itself dethroned and is allowed to contend with other concepts? 369 00:41:47,990 --> 00:41:56,090 And the Muslim tradition belief as a human, ethical disposition or orientation towards flourishing on the Earth doesn't deny frailty, 370 00:41:56,330 --> 00:42:04,190 including the frailty that has its wrong ourselves. Could it offer such resources in the search for what I call humility? 371 00:42:04,190 --> 00:42:13,640 Resources we are wanting to steer and invigorate and and and work against the malaise within Palestinian political imagination. 372 00:42:13,820 --> 00:42:23,060 We might look into Muslim experiences of governance, including Ottoman experiments, as in Tunisia, 373 00:42:23,570 --> 00:42:30,080 towards a decolonised, wise and durable governance in what is Israel Palestine today. 374 00:42:30,380 --> 00:42:39,260 And for conclusion from conclusion of just read you the following a Palestinian 375 00:42:39,260 --> 00:42:44,840 political imagination concerned with human flourishing beyond sovereignty paradigm, 376 00:42:45,140 --> 00:42:53,780 but including the including the flourishing of toleration in the homeland, should critically attend to the land's cultural patrimony. 377 00:42:53,840 --> 00:42:58,070 I'm talking about Palestine, Israel and the rich cultural patrimony of the land. 378 00:42:58,520 --> 00:43:05,239 This patrimony ineluctably includes but is not limited to a kind of governance of self and a governance 379 00:43:05,240 --> 00:43:10,820 of politics that had paradigmatic living in the longest on the record in the homeland history, 380 00:43:11,120 --> 00:43:23,599 namely the theories of Khalifa. But the imagination, political imagination, so attentive one that doesn't, in other words, succumb to secular isms, 381 00:43:23,600 --> 00:43:33,139 discursive wars and discursive checkpoints could scour this unduly locked chest box that is the 382 00:43:33,140 --> 00:43:40,280 Khalifa for humility resources that are necessary for reformulations of our modern moralities, 383 00:43:40,820 --> 00:43:44,240 such reformulation benefiting from what the world. 384 00:43:44,240 --> 00:43:49,630 Hallock, in his book, called The Impossible State, has called the retrieval of Islamic research. 385 00:43:50,090 --> 00:43:57,770 Excuse me, the retrieval of Islamic moral resources could aim at the proper binding, a proper thinking of the relationship, 386 00:43:58,010 --> 00:44:02,870 how we think better in our imagination of the relationship between reason and revelation, 387 00:44:03,260 --> 00:44:07,700 where reason is not tiring, how we think better, the relationship between fact and value, 388 00:44:08,450 --> 00:44:16,580 how we think the relation between our ethics and our politics. And of course, how do we face the questions of unity and plurality in politics? 389 00:44:17,450 --> 00:44:23,239 Opening that just box rather than running away from it appears to be the urgent task of any 390 00:44:23,240 --> 00:44:29,030 imagination that does not want to surrender into the leviathans Halloween of toleration. 391 00:44:30,140 --> 00:44:38,090 I'm assuming here that one of the most urgent tasks of Palestinian imagination is how do we honour that the the the plurality of Palestine, 392 00:44:38,690 --> 00:44:44,659 be it among humans themselves or be it between humans and the habitat, 393 00:44:44,660 --> 00:44:51,200 the natural habitat that they vicariously inherit and inhabit in Palestine no less than elsewhere. 394 00:44:51,440 --> 00:44:52,220 Thank you very much.